Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,157

a breath and begins again.

“‘Myron,’” she reads. “‘I’m sorry for my inexcusable behavior in the parking lot. It was completely uncalled for, and I owe you an apology. I certainly owe you an explanation, and you deserve one. So I’m going to give you that here, and then I’m sure you’ll be done with me.’”

I must have made a sound—an involuntary mmm—because Rita looks up and asks, “What? Too much?”

“I was thinking about the prison sentence,” I say. “I was just noticing that you’re assuming Myron abides by your same punishment system.” Rita thinks about that, crosses something out, then continues reading.

“‘Honestly, Myron,’” she continues from the legal pad, “‘at first I didn’t know why I slapped you. I thought it was because I was angry that you’d been dating that woman, who was, quite frankly, so beneath you. But more important, I couldn’t understand why we had been acting like a couple for months—why you would allow me to misperceive the situation in this way only to dispose of me. I know that you’ve since offered your reasons. You were afraid to start something romantic with me because if it turned out badly, you would lose our friendship. You were afraid that if it didn’t work out, we would feel awkward living in the same building—as if it weren’t tremendously awkward seeing you with that woman, whose cackle I could hear two floors up, even with my television on.’”

Rita looks up at me, raises her eyebrows in a question, and I shake my head. She strikes something out.

“‘But now, Myron,’” Rita goes on, “‘you say you want to take that risk. You say that I am worth that risk. And when you said that in the parking lot, I had to run because, believe it or not, I felt sorry for you. I felt sorry for you because you have no idea what kind of risk you’d be taking by getting involved with me. It wouldn’t be fair to let you take that risk without telling you who I really am.’”

A tear rolls down Rita’s face, then another, and she reaches for a side pocket in her artist’s portfolio, where she’s stuffed a bunch of tissues. As always, a box of tissues sits within arm’s reach, and it still makes me crazy that she won’t just take the tissues. She cries for a few moments, stuffs the used tissues into the pocket of the portfolio, then looks back at the pad.

“‘You think you know my past,’” she reads. “‘My marriages, the names and ages of my children, and the cities they live in, and that I don’t see them much. Well, much wasn’t accurate. I should have said that I don’t see them at all. Why? Because they hate me.’”

Rita chokes up, then composes herself and goes on.

“‘What you don’t know, Myron—what even my second and third husbands didn’t fully know—is that their father, my first husband, Richard, drank. And when he drank, he hurt our children, my children—sometimes with words, sometimes with his hands. He would hurt them in ways I can’t get myself to write here. Back then I would scream at him to stop, pleading, and he would yell back at me, and if he was very drunk, he’d hurt me too, and I didn’t want the children to see that, so I would stop. You know what I did instead? I would go in the other room. Did you read that, Myron? My husband would be hurting my children and I would go in the other room! And I would think, about my husband, You are ruining them forever, hurting them beyond repair, and I would know that I was ruining them too, and I would cry and do nothing.’”

Rita is crying so hard now she can no longer speak. She’s crying into her hands, and when she calms down, she unzips the portfolio’s pocket, pulls out the soiled tissues, wipes her face, licks her finger, and turns the page on the pad.

“‘Why didn’t I report it to the police, you may wonder. Why didn’t I leave and take the children with me? At the time, I told myself that there would be no way to survive, to take care of the children and get a decent job with no college degree. Every day, I would look at the want ads in the newspaper and think, I could be a waitress or a secretary or a bookkeeper, but could I make the hours and the